​CIA paid 2 torture experts $81mn for their 'unique expertise'

The so-called “Torture Report” released this week contains startling facts about the ways in which the CIA treated detainees. Also included, though, are details about the agency’s pricey contracts with those who designed the program described therein.

On Tuesday, the Senate
Intelligence Committee finally published its long awaited executive summary
concerning the apparent “enhanced interrogation techniques”
carried out by CIA agents against suspected Al-Qaeda militants
after the September 11 terrorist attacks. And while the report is
indeed brimming with grim facts about waterboarding, sleep
deprivation and other tactics used by the agency with little
affect or oversight, its authors also included a substantial
amount of information about the two federal contractors paid
millions of dollars by the United States for designing the
program of torture that was used for years against individuals
held captive in covert overseas prisons.

According to the Senate panel’s long-awaited report, two
contractors in particular – codenamed 'Swigert' and 'Dunbar' –
played a pivotal role in advising the CIA as the agency sought
tactics to interrogate suspected terrorists in the wake of 9/11.
Reports published as far back as almost a decade ago identify
those men as James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen – two
psychologists who made bank by designing the torture program and
to this day remain on Uncle Sam’s payroll.

In all, the Senate report suggests that the two contractors who
created the torture program were paid more than $80 million in
taxpayer money for their work with the CIA. The government has
agreed to cover upwards of $5 million in additional indemnity
costs for the two men if they incur legal costs for their role as
interrogation program architects through 2021, and the executive
summary released on Tuesday after nearly four years of work
suggests the pair has already received $1.1 million due to legal
fees largely involving the creation of the Senate Committee’s
report.

Those men, the Senate Intelligence Committee said this week, were
the “sole source contract to provide operational
psychologists, debriefers and security personnel at CIA detention
sites.”

In 2002, the CIA sent 'Swigert' to an unnamed country, according
to the report, where he would initially “consult on the
psychological aspects” of the planned interrogation of Abu
Zubaydah – a Palestinian man captured that March in Pakistan as
an enemy combatant.

Within a month of Zubaydah being captured, CIA headquarters had
decided that the detainee would be interrogated by what the
Senate report described as “the most coercive option”
available to the government: a regiment designed by Swigert but
opposed by the FBI.

The tactics proposed by Swigert, according to the report,
included cramped confinement, wall standing, stress positions,
sleep deprivation, waterboarding, forcing detainees to wear
diapers, and what the Senate called “mock burial.” Swigert had
come up with those suggestions and others along with 'Dunbar,'
and told the CIA that the men should be contracted together to
aid with interrogations.

Both Swigert and Dunbar lacked previous involvement in any
real-world interrogations, the Senate Committee found, and had
proposed a policy of torture developed decades earlier by the US
based on resisting torture tactics that the North Vietnamese
might have used against American troops. Regardless of their
inexperience and their insistence on using crude techniques
intended to sometimes bring detainees close to death, however,
the government gave both contractors millions of dollars over the
course of several years to oversee the program they orchestrated
under then-President George W. Bush.

“Neither psychologist had experience as an interrogator, nor
did either have specialized knowledge of Al-Qaeda, a background
in terrorism or any relevant regional, cultural or linguistic
expertise,” the Senate report reads.

Nevertheless, the contractors "implicitly proposed continued
use of the technique – at a daily compensation reported to be
$1800/day, or four times that of interrogators who could not use
the technique,” the Senate found.

As recently as June 2013, the CIA stood by their decision to
contract the two men, telling the Intelligence Committee that
Swigert and Dunbar’s “academic research” and
“research papers” made them credible architects of the
interrogation program. In response, the SIC wrote that the CIA
failed to “describe any experience related to actual
interrogations or counterterrorism, or any relevant cultural,
geographic or linguistic expertise” exhibited by either man.

“We believe their expertise was so unique that we would have
been derelict had we not sought them out when it became clear
that CIA would be heading into the uncharted territory of the
program,” the CIA told Senate staffers.

In a rare interview with ABC News this week, Mitchell condemned
the Senate Committee’s findings.

"The men and women of the CIA put their lives on the line,
put their personal lives on hold, and sacrificed for this
country. And now at last, before they leave, dump this steaming
load of crap out?" he said. "It's like somebody backed
up to your driveway and dumped a steaming pile of horse
crap.”